The Beautiful and the Good
Of the many entries under the heading
“life is not fair,” surely one of the most
egregious is the “what is beautiful is
good” stereotype. One of our strongest
cognitive biases, it ma kes us ascribe to
physically attractive people a formidable
array of positive traits. According to
studies going back 40 years, we assume
that attractive adults a re more compe-
tent, better adjusted, powerful, mentally
healthy, intelligent, and more socially
skilled tha n less attractive ones.
This “what is beautiful is good” ste-
reotype manifests in a slew of real-life
situations and is by no means a one-study
wonder: it has been documented in piles
of research. Taken as a whole, the studies
show that this is one of the more robust
cognitive biases operating in the human
mind. It may also be one of the oldest.
The Greek poet Sappho is credited with
first asserting, 2,600 yea rs ago, that
“what is beautiful is good,” while in 1882
the German romantic poet Friedrich
Schiller wrote that “physical beauty is
the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual
and moral beauty.”
To conduct studies of attractiveness
bias, researchers don’t t ry to solve the
culturally laden mystery of why people
in pa rticula r cultures find some faces
“attractive” and others not. Their assump-
tion is simply that in any given time and
place, some faces are generally deemed
beautiful, others are regarded as so-so,
and still others as decidedly unatt ractive.
To probe whether people associate
physical attractiveness with positive
Sharon Begley is the senior
health and science correspondent
at Reuters, author of Train Your
Mind, Change Your Brain, and
coauthor with Richard Davidson of
The Emotional Life of Your Brain.
Illustration by Malin Rosenqvist
What are our brains
doing when we assume
that someone who’s
beautiful on the outside
must be beautiful on
the inside? Sharon
Begley investigates.
30 mindful August 2013
mind/body